... That option no longer exists: Britain 1974-76 John Medhurst Winchester: Zero Books, 2014, £11.99, p/b www.zero-books.net Rexamaining the mid-1970s from a Labour left perspective, as the author does, is an interesting idea. Once again we can read about:* the Communist Party's Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions, which resulted in the CP having 'an influence within the trade union movement vastly out of proportion to its numbers' (pp. 13/4 );* the Institute for Workers' Control (chapter 3);* the decision of the Labour Party to abolish the proscription list of organisations to which members of the Labour Party could not ...

... Board which included MPs the Rev. Martin Smyth, Patrick Wall, Nicholas Winterton, Neil Hamilton, Bill Walker and former MP Stefan Terlezki. (12) Like its parent organisation, Western Goals (UK) from the beginning was intimately linked with WACL and its circle. At the time of foundation Wall was President of the British Anti Communist Council (BACC), then the British 'Chapter' of WACL. Also present at the launch was Peter Dally, responsible for running BACC. The former Conservative MP, Terlezki, was a key figure in the British section of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN). Western Goals (UK) 's early links with WACL ...

... ,400. Labour Research (October 1987) produced a very useful pull together of the basic information on some of the groups clustered around the right-wing of the Tory Party. Some are the old favourites- Aims, Adam Smith, IEA etc- but some are the more recent and obscure of them, including: Centre for Research into Communist Economics, Policy Search, the Ross McWhirter Foundation and the Research Foundation for the Study of Terrorism. (Illustrated is its notepaper listing- thanks to Phil Edwards for this). The Research Foundation for the Study of Terrorism TRUSTEES Professor Paul Wilkinson MA (Chairman); Professor of International Relations, University of Aberdeen Michael Ivens CBE Norris ...

... Escape and The Wooden Horse). He became obsessed with the well-publicised exploits of a notorious Dutch solder, Raymond 'Turk' Westerling, who was fighting against Indonesian nationalists in the Celebes. This obsession grew into a determination to join the Special Air Service, the celebrated British wartime unit that had been re-formed in Malaya in 1951 to fight the Communists. De la Billiere's concern in this account of his early years is to establish his credentials as someone who did not toe the line or obey the rules. This is the stuff of which the adventurer, the hero, is made. It is the upper class misfits who are the best defenders of Empire, the real bulwarks of ...

... , had the Left and the Labour movement ever seriously challenged the power of the ruling class in Britain, the British state would have put its carefully laid 'counter-insurgency' plans into operation with the same brutality it employed in colonial contexts. The Liberal Democratic Holocaust Of course Stalinism was a murderous system; but the British Empire, which so repelled Communists of Letty Norwood's generation, has a few mountains of corpses to its credit, too. The Bengal Famine of 1943-4, as avoidable and as man-made as the famine that Stalin caused, killed up to 5 million people. In the First World War 2.5 million working-class Britons and Empire citizens died in an insanely futile conflict; 3, ...

... in the West in the past decade has been the status of the claims made by KGB defector Golitsyn. Until recently all the book-reading public knew about Golitsyn was (a) that he has exposed some (relatively minor) Soviet operations; (b) made a series of quite bizarre sounding claims to the effect that the divisions within the Communist bloc were a device to mislead the capitalist states in the West; and (c) that the KGB had achieved high-level penetration of all the West's intelligence services. Golitsyn's views were apparently accepted by some intelligence officers in the West- notably James Angleton, until 1974 head of CIA's Counter Intelligence division- and mole hunting became the order ...

... . This appears still to be the basic assumption of most academic teachers of politics, most of the mass media, and, I fear, most of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The importance of Wallace, Holroyd, Peter Wright, Cathy Massiter et al in the 1980s was their falsification of this theory. MI5, the FBI and the Communist Parties of Britain and America In The Clandestine Caucus (3) I referred, in a footnote, to the extraordinary penetration of the Communist Party USA by the FBI. I mentioned this only in passing there because I could not then obtain from the library the book which contained the details, David J. Garrow's The FBI and Martin ...

... Korean prisoners, but also spiked drinks at a New York City party house, paid prostitutes to slip LSD to their customers for Agency concerns at a San Francisco safe house, pumped halluc-inogens into children at summer camp, attempted behaviour modification on inmates at California's Vacaville prison and collected powerful toxins from Amazon tribes. Terminal experiments were carried out on Communist defectors who were suspected of being double agents. Mind control proved a fantasy, but academic research on sensory deprivation opened the possibility of a revolution in methods of torture. The work of Donald Hebbs and Ewen Cameron was particularly important. Cameron carried out CIA-financed experiments on his unsuspecting mentally ill patients at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal, ...

... Youth Section in Brighton in March.(19) In February the ICFTUE participated in the 4th national congress of L'Unione Italiana del Lavoro (UIL) in Montecatini, at which they assisted in a number of seminars. Much importance was attached, by both ICFTUE and UIL, to the need for co-operation of workers to combat 'dictatorial regimes, Communist or Fascist'.(20) Perhaps more importantly, the ICFTUE, with the assistance of Hermann Patteet of the ICFTU, participated in 'a large conference organised to discuss the economic and cultural situation of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe' by the European Movement in January, in Brussels.(21) Also early in 1964 ...

... the chase. Curled up on the floor of Young's car with its diplomatic registration plates, the major was safely brought past the Soviet military check point east of Vienna. Russian long-term intentions were a hard nut to crack and the KGB was a ruthless opponent. There was little doubt as to the immediate post-war Soviet aim of bringing Austria under Communist control. After the 1947 crackdown in Romania and Hungary, the main KGB staff were transferred to the Russian HQ at Baden-bei-Wien, the scene of Prince Orlovsky's ball in Die Fledermaus, and there was an increase in arbitrary arrests and detentions by Soviet patrols. The Austrian Ministers who nowadays do not get much credit in the British media, ...